Good news! Actually, we can probably throw that trope in the trash by now, but affordable vehicles are still good news, so why not beat a dead horse for a while longer? There’s a new Dacia Duster for the European market, and this tiny sub-£20,000 entry-level crossover has a set of size 14 shoes to fill. Demand for the current Duster is so strong that one rolls off the production line in Romania every minute and 26 seconds. That’s 1,000 Dusters a day, all because people want something cheap and practical for A-to-B driving. With a following like that, the new one simply has to be good.

Early signs are promising, even down to the fundamentals. The new Dacia Duster rides on Renault’s CMF-B platform, which is essentially the Renault Nissan Mitsubishi Alliance’s replacement for the V-platform the current Nissan Versa rides on. Not only should this give the Duster greater refinement than many of the cheapest Nissans sold in America, it permits a higher degree of electrification. Yep, the new Dacia Duster is available as a hybrid.

In the Duster 140 Hybrid model, a 94-horsepower 1.6-liter four-cylinder engine, a 49-horsepower electric motor, a generator, and a tiny 1.2 kWh battery pack all work in harmony to keep fuel consumption down without being a rolling chicane. Even the traditional 130 TCe model with its turbocharged 1.2-liter three-cylinder engine gets 48-volt mild hybrid assistance, and there’s even a gasoline-and-LPG model that can keep an astonishing 26.4 gallons of crude-derived sauce onboard for a theoretical driving range of 807 miles.

However, even setting aside the intriguing powertrain diversity and the promise of a newly-refined platform, the new Dacia Duster seems promising because you just get the sense it was made by clever people who actually live in the real world and are constantly trying to do more with less. Take the, um, urban armoring, for example.

When you buy a new car, the ideal is for it to remain spotless, perfect, and pristine for as long as possible. You park far away from other people, braving the rain or snow or hot tarmac or whatever to protect what matters to you. Then the supermarket PA system starts playing Luther Vandross, a shopping cart decides to get its bump-and-grind on, and the bumper of your expensive new machine is marred, a scar on an otherwise well-kept car. Well, Dacia’s partly solved this because those big grey accent pieces on the Duster’s front and rear bumpers are molded in color instead of being painted. And so, they’ll look pretty much the same whether they’re pristine or scraped up, since the coloring goes all the way through. Oh, and all the unpainted plastic on the Duster’s are manufactured with up to 20 percent recycled material that offers an interesting texture. See what I mean? Clever stuff.

Then there’s the matter of holding our smartphones. Through the early half of the 2000s, the race was on to build ever-smaller, ever-thinner, ever-lighter phones that could slip in just about any pocket. Then mobile streaming came along. These days, you can buy an iPhone 15 Pro Max with a 6.7-inch display, which is big enough to get Steve Jobs spinning in his grave so quickly, you could use him to power a generator and easily run Palo Alto on renewable energy. Unfortunately, big phones don’t fit very well in many cars’ interior cubbies, but Dacia’s thought of that. The new Duster will come with mounting points for up to six different smartphone clips that are scattered around the cabin, ensuring no one’s portal to the digital world gets cast into the triangle of doom between the seats and the center console when a flock of geese suddenly appear in the road and emergency actions are required.

Oh, and of course, there’s still a base model that promises to be cheap but good, decontented in intelligent ways while still providing some modicum of nice-to-have equipment. The Dacia Duster Essential doesn’t even feature a traditional head unit, just a 3.5 mm auxiliary audio port, a phone holder on the dashboard, and a set of steering wheel-mounted audio controls. After all, isn’t the most powerful infotainment system the one you bring with you anyway? This audio setup must save Dacia a ton of money, as there’s room in the budget to bring rear ultrasonic parking sensors onboard. Not even a new Tesla Model S has those.

Needless to say, I like the new Dacia Duster on first glance. I still can’t figure out why each front door features a piece of plastic trim that looks like a mailbox, but the intrigue of the car outweighs that styling decision. Most people don’t need fully-automated premium lifestyle daily drivers, and the reasonably-priced car market is absolutely underserved right now. If anything, the new Duster would make a fantastic Nissan Kicks for the North American market. Renault Nissan Mitsubishi Alliance, if you’re listening, make it so.

(Photo credits: Dacia)

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